The light-bearer, when the door opens, is a fat guy with a crappy moustache. Lint on his velvet monkey-suit. These uniforms used to seem so sharp back when Charlie would come here for his annual tooth-cleaning. He can remember standing by the elevator bank, trying not to panic, Mom squeezing his arm. It’s Pulaski squeezing now, muttering for Charlie to keep his mouth shut. Then something cracks as the little inspector draws himself up to his full height. “We need to inspect the premises.” No way they’d get away with this by daylight.
“What are you, reporters?”
“NYPD.”
The inspector pulls the badge back as a hand reaches for it.
“So what’s with the camera?” Indicating Charlie.
“My partner here is undercover—”
“We need to see the fortieth floor,” Charlie says. It takes nerve, in the face of Pulaski’s dirty look, but he’s recalled something else: the brass directory board, and, a few spots above Dr. DeMoto, The Hamilton-Sweeney Company, Suite 4000. It’s as if, he thinks, nothing’s ever really gone—as if the shards just hide somewhere inside, waiting to be put back together. He might find this comforting, given time to linger on it, but the fat attendant’s still blocking the way.
“I’ll have to go get the building manager.”
“I’m afraid there’s no time for that,” Pulaski says.
“Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to show me a warrant.”
The deal with this city’s functionaries is, you want to keep them from establishing position, because once they do, they’ll defend it to the death. But the inspector is unsnapping something up near his armpit, flashing his beam there. His words stay courtly, but their timbre is tougher. “It seems to me there are extenuating circumstances. Our typewriters downtown are all electric. Not to speak of how hard it is to reach a judge at, what is it now, quarter to twelve? So let’s say in the spirit of civic cooperation you show me and my partner the fastest way up to the top floor. No, I mean physically guide us. And don’t fret about your boss. When the time comes, I’ll tell him what a stand-up guy you were.”
A skyscraper turns out to be a lot like a person. There is the outward face, with all its impressive ornament, and then suddenly vulnerability: in this case, a hinged maple panel behind the security desk. It swings open at the attendant’s touch. The two flashlights loop and dart over patches of unpainted concrete, ashtrays and scattered playing cards, a bucket of custodial orts. A stairwell leads up into a dark that might be infinite. Charlie’s lungs tighten again. “You mean your elevator’s not hooked to a generator?”
“Pal, if there was a generator, would I be dicking around with a flashlight?”
It’s a solid point, but then how to explain that warning light up top? That is, unless it really is the signal Charlie’s been waiting for all these months, summoning him in to begin his climb.
BETH ISRAEL HOSPITAL—CA. 11:50 P.M.
BUT MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE GONE TO ST. VINCENT’S. The man in the cart is so much heavier than she’s assumed, and the crosstown blocks so much longer. They’ve just come through one of the city’s two Lighting Districts; she’d thought it wonderful, once, that there should be enough of anything to constitute a district (enough flowers, enough fashion, enough diamonds). But tonight there was no light in the Lighting District, only dark, vaguely hominid shapes moving singly or in pairs, and then, drawing close behind, sirens, smashing, the odor of flame. The faster she and Mercer pushed, the more the sidewalk jolted the cart, until it almost seemed the body inside was stirring. There have been periodic pauses, too, to bicker. But now there is relief, trees, rustlings of leaf no longer quite invisible in their boxes—and above, the massive hospital, windows stacked and fully lit, the only real light in sight.
What she wasn’t expecting was the line. It seems to stretch all the way back to Second Avenue. Men in uniform flank the doors by the ambulance bay. Paramedics, with clipboards. “I’ll be back,” she tells Mercer, and goes to talk to them. She passes wheelchairs, splinted arms, clutched stomachs, a person leaning over to retch into a bush, another with what appears to be a club-wound to the head. The medics, by contrast, are crisp and untroubled. They could be twins. Where were you an hour ago, she wants to ask. And now, with all these people … ? She figures the ER must be understaffed—a supposition the medics confirm. Every exam room, every stretcher, every seat is full. Unless you’ve got something high up on the triage list, you could be out here till dawn. “It’s not me,” she says. “It’s one of the guys with me. A car hit him. He’s been unconscious since.”
“You saw the collision?”
How to put this. “In a manner of speaking.”
“He bleeding?”
“Not that I can tell, but—”
“As long as he’s breathing, he’s doing better than anyone inside. We’ll send someone over to do an assessment, but most likely he’s going to have to wait.”
Walking back toward the corner, she imagines a campaign to swap out the city’s entire disaster-response apparatus with conscripts, like jury duty. Well, not the fire department. Show her a firefighter, and Jenny will reach for her heart and sing you “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But just as she’s trying to explain to Mercer why they’ll have to stick around for a while, there’s a small electronic beep.
“What’s that?” Beeep. “It’s your watch, isn’t it?”
An indictment. She hands it to him. Her tongue feels stuck to the roof of her mouth. “It’s the little button on the side. But midnight doesn’t necessarily mean anything, Mercer. Don’t you think we’d hear it if a bomb went off in the East Village?”
“I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what we would have heard.”
“The timing was a guess, remember, and someone could have gotten there first to stop it. Didn’t you say—”
“But not the target, that wasn’t a guess! We’ve known all along William was in danger. Yet here we are, with this other guy.”
“Wait, listen—are those sirens?” Again, if she hadn’t known better, she would have said the figure in the cart had stirred. “No, sorry. Same one. As long as there’s not some big exodus of ambulances from the line up there …”
Another siren keens. Another pause. Five seconds. Ten.
“This has been a farce,” he says, “this whole expedition. I have to go.”
“Mercer, we can’t just leave this guy to suffer. At least not until a doctor comes.”
“Don’t you dare act like I’m indifferent to suffering. I’m telling you, I have to find William. I have to know, one way or another.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” she says, already hearing he’s right. How selfish it sounds. “But I guess that’s not your problem. I know you need to find out. Just be careful, okay?”
Mercer is almost to the corner when she notices that the white guy in the shopping cart is sitting up, watching him go. “You’re awake!” But by the time she looks back to Mercer for a reaction, he has passed beyond the light.
“Who are you?” the guy asks. “Do I know you?”
“Damn … You can talk, too! You’re at the hospital.” Maybe it’s for the best that he doesn’t seem to remember why. “There was an accident, a car. Look. How many fingers am I holding up?”
“I can’t see for shit. What did you do to the light?”
“It’s a blackout. Wait, stop moving, you’re not supposed to move.” But he is already standing, so tall in the cart that others on line turn and gape. He looks nothing so much as surprised at their sheer number—the way a ghost might on discovering there’s an afterlife after all. Which in a sense is the case, Jenny just has time to think, before he leaps to the ground, falls. Rises and begins to lope off down the street. He is graceful in the air, but less so on the hoof. When he collapses again, a half-block south, she is only a few yards behind. Deeper back, people watch, mystified. “Hey. Hey.” She takes his arm. “Are you familiar with the phrase ‘the triumph of hope over experience’? Somebody
practically drove over you. We’ve got to get you checked out.”
In the light of a passing car, he looks younger than before, his mouth as sensitive as a child’s. It pinches in concentration. She can hear the machinery of his brain ratcheting into gear, until that turns into someone trying to start another car stalled down the block. Ayuh yuh yuh. “I’ve got to get home.” He has a little twang, like Mercer. Git. If I can’t physically compel his return to the ER, she thinks, I can at least out-talk him, but then a further voice speaks up again—or not actually a voice so much as an idea, implanted in her head. How does she know it isn’t her own? Because it is to Let it drop, and Jenny’s never done any such thing in her life.
“Well, how is that going to happen? You can’t walk unsupported, obviously.”
He tries to demonstrate he’ll do just that, but his knee crumples again after a few more yards. “Damn it!”
She waits for him to ask for help, lets him hang there a minute. Does she have to do everything herself? Then she sighs and pulls his arm over her shoulder. It will be much later in the night, or at least seem to be, before it even occurs to her to ask where they’re going.
UPPER WEST SIDE—EARLIER
DEEP DOWN, WILLIAM HAMILTON-SWEENEY has always believed that were he ever to give his father an honest accounting of his feelings, the world would spontaneously combust. What happens instead is precisely nothing. The library’s walls do not collapse, nor is there even any change in Daddy’s audible breathing. He presses on. “It’s true. I’m sure Regan’s come up with a million reasons why I stayed away, she’s the champion rationalizer, but the reality, Daddy, is just that simple: you’re an asshole. And if I’ve got to sit up here—which I only agreed to do as a favor to her, by the way—I don’t want there to be any temptation for either of us to pretend not to know what’s in the other’s heart.”
A dozen little beads of flame glimmer behind the divan where his father perches. Unless the word is settee. The domestics seem to have jumped ship before Amory did (assuming he didn’t have them whacked as well), so Daddy must have been the one to settle himself like this, propping expensive cushions under his elbows in the manner of some Old Testament judge. No candles having been lit on his side of the room, though, his grimace at William’s impropriety remains barely perceptible. “Although that would be the Hamilton-Sweeney way, wouldn’t it? I should have known you’d just sit here and not say a word.”
And in a sense, silent disapproval is worse than any explosion. William moves toward the chest of drawers on the north wall, ostensibly looking for more light, but actually awaiting another infusion of courage, or candor, or whatever this is. It’s as if a great inscrutable force, the higher power to whom he’s been addressing himself these last few weeks, has steered him back to where everything started, and now he badly needs it to tell him what to do. He cocks his head, tries to lose himself in the spines of books. Amends, is the word Bill W. uses in the Big Book. Maybe he’s supposed to use his own silence to wrench from Daddy the amends he wants, but all he gets is Daddy’s cleared throat, this cartilaginous tic that was always annoying as hell.
“The irony is, I was only a couple miles away all these years. Amory didn’t mention that either, did he? But trust me, I’m sure he kept abreast. The drugs, all of it. You could have found me easily enough, but why do that? I was doing you a favor by not being around to remind you of things we both knew. It’s like we’ve been living in two different cities. You up here in all this marbled comfort, and me down there, killing myself in slow motion.”
It is one of Bill W.’s precepts that talking about your most shameful behaviors, exposing their undersides to the air, will make you feel better. In practice, though, as long as he won’t do more than harrumph at the possibility that they’re worth listening to, it’s Bill H-S who has the upper hand. And he knows it, they both know it.
“One of those things being that I’m a homosexual, Daddy. Or what was it you used to say when Liberace was on TV? A queer duck. I know this comes as no surprise, but for the record: I am attracted to men. I have sex with them,” William hears himself say. “And since I’m laying my cards on the table, I did end up finding someone I could fall in love with. Do you want to guess what happened next? I fucked it up, is what. I lied. I withheld. I was cold and prideful and within myself. All this shit I’ve been carrying around because of you, I couldn’t let go of, because I no longer knew where it stopped and the rest of me started. I clung to it like a guy who’s shipwrecked and doesn’t trust he can swim.”
There’s a rush of heat now on the back of his neck, like someone else has brought a torch into the room, but when he turns, he finds only more darkness. It’s just him and the inscrutable face before him, a contest of wills. Of Wills, he thinks. He lapses into silence, which he manages to keep up for an impressive time, whole minutes, maybe. But every impulse becomes unbearable sooner or later.
“Did you notice how you never touched me, Daddy, after Mom died? It was like I had contracted some disease. You had plenty of chances to like tousle my hair, or hug me, or punch me, even, but the best I ever got was a handshake. I used to think I remembered my shoulder being squeezed at the burial, but that was Uncle Artie. I’m sure this sounds like more childishness, but back then, I still looked at you like a god whose big hands could rescue me, if only I could get them to touch me.”
There’s a single candle left in the rightmost drawer, and a book of matches he uses to light a cigarette. He squints against the smoke.
“One of the things recovery has helped me see is how I was always trying to put myself in a position to be rescued. Regan was usually the one who rode in on her white charger, but one day, I thought, if I could just make it so the trouble was too big for her, you would have to step in. But you couldn’t even do that for Regan, could you.”
What he himself can’t do, having crossed again to within a half-dozen feet, is meet Daddy’s gaze. There’s a sour-sweet smell like ammonia, but he ignores it.
“I think you know I was right that day, by the way, no matter what Regan decided to hold back. The day we came to you, before the rehearsal dinner. You always did have feelings, where she was concerned. And you’re not a stupid man. Your daughter was left pregnant, without good options, and entirely on her own.” He’s had half a lifetime to circle around what a just resolution might really have looked like. “You should have called off the merger, at least, if not your marriage. You should have had the guy’s head on a pike, and Amory’s. Don’t tell yourself that keeping Regan close, making her a Director or however you say it, was the same as giving her what she needed. She was suffering so much with what happened that she used to make herself throw up. Did you know that? I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and I pretty much knew. You like to think of yourself as a man of duty, but when you’ve got one kid with a finger down her throat and another shooting his inheritance into his veins … you kind of have to wonder. And now Amory’s got you poised for the fall, from what I can see. Not to mention trying to have me taken out. And what’s your first instinct when I come to tell you? You stick up for him.”
Somehow, though, the closer William gets to justice, the worse he feels. There’s that “condition” people keep alluding to; maybe Daddy doesn’t remember any of this. Maybe, in fact, it was grief over William’s running away that began his decline. In which case who, really, owes amends to whom? And who is that enormous impersonal consciousness he senses out there beyond the edges, watching, expecting, disapproving? Maybe it’s none other than himself. Maybe out there is in here.
“I’ll tell you something else. I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I’m on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer—that’s his name, my ex—and both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I’m supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned? Until tonight, I would have said it was
the day before your wedding, with Regan and the toast and all that, but right now I’m thinking it’s right now. I mean, here we are for the first time in years, I’m talking about you never having touched me, and meanwhile your hand is right there, three feet away, and you still can’t reach across whatever separates us and just touch you. Me.”
He sits there for a while feeling the implications of this error, like a man running his tongue over a loose molar. Time is doing this funny thing where he can’t tell how much of it is passing. Also space: the darkened walls seem to have slid back on tracks, like scenery into the wings, leaving the two of them alone in this flickering circumference. There has to be some way to wound Daddy. To make him feel the cruelty Amory Gould had presided over. But it had taken William years to riddle out its intricacies himself, and then only after he’d been able to put aside the belief that Amory had marshaled resources beyond his grasp of human nature. Years Daddy wouldn’t spend. Or didn’t have. Meaning Amory hadn’t had to preside, not really. And somewhere, William must still be seventeen, the boy rushing to throw himself athwart the tracks of his fate, because he feels that at last he’s reached it, the part that matters, the thing that must be seen. (As somewhere else, he turns away, because he cannot bear to look.) Try again, William. Make it all connect. Grip the knife and twist.
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